Hello,
I am a citizen of Saudi Arabia but it isnt my home country. Unfortunately the naming system of Saudi Arabia doesnt distinguish into first name and last due to which I got confused and registered only half of my name(eg: If name= X Y Z
registered name = Y Z where X Y Z=different parts of my name). And now when I contacted college board and reported about this problem, they asked for documents in which my name appears as I want it to be. Unfortunately, none of my documents contain my name distinguished into different parts. And without informing they closed the case. I tried calling them afterwards like 3-4 times and every time nothing happened. They didnt respond nor did they take any action. I even sent a mail and informed them about the problems that I was facing and it said that they would reply after 3-5 business days, and today is like the 7th day and they didnt respond with anything.
I fear that this would cause problems in the future when I go back to my home country(not western countries) and they ask for my full name. I already wrote 1 SAT exam without any problem. Please advise me what I can do now? And also I already registered for the November SAT in Saudi Arabia.
If you are a Saudi citizen living in a different country, you therefore have a Saudi passport which has an English transliteration of your name. That is the name you should use consistently for your testing/applications/etc. So you should have the CB change the name to match. If your current registration bears some semblance to the name on your passport, you should not have an issue at the test center, even if the CB does not fix before the test. You are far from the first person who has had this issue. Good luck.
Thanks for your help mate,
The only problem is the the CB are asking for documents in which my name is distinguished into first name and last name, which apparently, I dont have.
Yes you do, although you may not know it. The bottom of your passport picture page is a machine-readable zone (the area with all the <<<<<<<), which has your first and last name in English transliteration. It may or may not be what you consider your first and last name to be, but it is how the Saudi government decided to decode it.
I have 3 parts to it: Pcountryname<<X<Y<Z<<<<<<<<<<
In which case, “X” is your surname/family name. “Y” should be your first/given name and “Z” should be your patronymic (or some other name). “Y” and “Z” may be the other way around; I don’t have a Saudi passport in front of me. “bin” “ibn” “al” etc are probably omitted from the English transliteration. Don’t worry about it one way or the other.
Again, you are not the first person the does not have a name that conforms with the FirstMiddleLast US standard. People from Spanish-speaking countries often have double last names. Some people have hyphenated last names. Some people have prepositions in their surnames (de, o’, van, etc). My own legal last name is actually two surnames with a preposition which I usually have to truncate because the online form does not allow that many characters. Trust me - they figure it out.
Thanks Alot mate. You just relieved me completely!